Ministry of Environment and Tourism of Namibia has revised the national policy on Human Wildlife Conflict in efforts to prevent incidents that have escalated over the years.

Cases of human wildlife conflict in the country become more frequent over the years with communities and farmers expressing concern regarding the issue, said the Environment Ministry spokesperson, Romeo Muyunda.

“In this regard, we have revised the 2009 Human Wildlife Conflict policy to look at new strategies to better address the situation,” Muyunda  added.

Human wildlife conflict is any event in which animals injure, destroy or damage human life or property and are killed, injured, captured or otherwise harmed as a result both humans and animals suffer from the interaction with each other.

Muyunda informed that the policy which deals with human deaths, injuries, livestock losses and crop damages by wildlife will be officially launched next week by the Environment Minister, Pohamba Shifeta.

Meanwhile last year the Ministry launched the North-West Human Lion Conflict Management Plan with specific strategies to manage lion incidents with humans, while farmets routinly indudlge in retaliatory killings and poisoning of losing their habitat big cats.

Gradually Namibia became notorious for  lion’s killings, increasingly attracting attention of researchers raising their concerns about the brutality of extermination of country’s lions population.